Verizon Wireless -- the U.S. mobile carrier jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and Vodafone Group Plc. (LON:VOD) -- has aired its Q4 2012 financials and they paint a pretty intriguing picture.

On one hand you have Verizon blazing on the warpath of continued growth. Big Red added a record 2.1m customers, broadening its lead over rival AT&T, Inc. (T). The sales were heavily impacted by Verizon's year-old deal with Apple, Inc. (AAPL); in fact 87 percent of new subscribers reportedly purchased an iPhone 5. IPhone sales doubled to 6.2 million units in total.

The company now has 98.2 million wireless subscribers. AT&T has not yet disclosed its subscriber count, but it is expected to fall in the 60-70 million range. Verizon enjoys a health lead over AT&T, the second place U.S. wireless carrier in terms of subscribers.

Verizon also continues to accelerate its LTE deployment, moving 7.3 million LTE smartphones and hotspots for the quarter. The carrier's LTE network now accounts for 50 percent of its data traffic and covers 276 million Americans nationwide.

But the dollar figures painted a different tale -- Verizon earned a mere 45 cents per share, excluding one-time restructuring fees and costs relating to Hurricane Sandy's damage (which totaled 7 cents per share). Analysts had hoped for a healthier 50 cents per share, the average target in a Bloomberg consensus.

The profit was hurt by the same factor that drove the record subscriber growth -- Big Red's equally big subsidies. Avi Greengart, an analyst with Current Analysis, tellsBloomberg that the tradeoff may pay off in the long run, but is painful fiscally in the short term. He comments, "It’s a big upfront cost on smartphones and a short-term hit. They have to offer enormously expensive phones at affordable prices to move customers onto higher-priced plans."

When charges are considered Verizon Wireless posted a loss of $4.23B USD. However, that figure was probably the least troublesome to investors, as it was mainly driven by a one-time $7.19B USD charge that covered severance pay/benefits and adjustments to pension debt.

Overall Verizon made $30B USD in revenue, up 5.7 percent from a year ago. That figure was in line with the analyst estimates of $29.8B USD.

But even on the growth front there was one sore spot for Verizon. New subscriptions of the company's FiOS internet service stalled to only 134,000, down from the 194,000 it gained a year ago.

I just left Verizon for Sprint. Verizon wanted to end my unlimited data, and charge me $35 activation fee for a new phone. Sprint gave me a cheaper plan with unlimited data and it cost me less to get a phone. The coverage is definitely noticeable, but saving $8 on my bill and still having unlimited data, Sprint was the better deal.

Funny but I just left Sprint for Verizon. And paid a hefty early termination fee to do it. You'll find out for yourself that trading a reliable signal for unlimited data just isn't worth it. Is it a coincidence that the carrier with the worst network out of the big three just so happens to offer unlimited data? WiMax is a completely inferior transmission technology (might explain why nobody else besides Sprint uses it?) and I couldn't take one more second of Sprint's terrible latency and 4G speeds. If I was lucky enough to even HAVE 4G signal.

Unlimited data is a gimmick. I was never using more than 5 Gigs of data anyway, which is what Verizon throws in with my plan.

Back to the article, any slowed growth with Verizon's FIOS is obviously attributed to the extreme resistance they've met by municipal ISP's and local governments who've granted area monopolies. For example in my city we only have one ISP to choose from, I would love FIOS but Verizon just isn't allowed to build out here.